16-Year-Old Launches Organization to Battle Warrantless Surveillance

Brandon Keibler is just your ordinary 16-year-old from Southern Indiana. At least that's what some people might think. However, having become an activist at fourteen and helping to establish the Restore the Fourth organization, this young man has just launched an organization to encourage grassroots efforts aimed at a tyrannical government that wishes to disregard the fact that they are bound by law to gain a warrant before they search or seize anything of any American citizen. This also includes warrantless surveillance of individuals.

Project Digital Privacy was launched on January 24, 2015 as a result of increased social activism in regards to government surveillance.

According to the organization's website, "Technology and global communication has reached a steady rate of advancement, with new forms of communicative devices and concepts being formed every day. As such, it is in the best interest of both citizens of the United States and the world to keep it from becoming corrupted in any manner — to preserve the powerful and ever evolving nature of these advancements. We are an organization that is dedicated to non-violently ending warrantless digital surveillance at the local level."

"What we're trying to do at Project Digital Privacy is to end warrantless surveillance at the local level by police departments through the use of legislation and resolutions in cities and counties," he told Freedom Outpost.

In a similar method to how Dan Johnson of People Against the National Defense Authorization Act (PANDAA) is orchestrating a movement to nullify the 2012 NDAA with its unconstitutional indefinite detention sections, Keibler is hoping to do the same in a fight against criminal warrantless surveillance by peace officers. In fact, he said that the model of his organization is based on Johnson's.

In a press release by release by Project Digital Privacy, Keibler wrote:

The goal of the organization is to end warrantless digital surveillance by local police forces in which programs, like STINGRAY, tap into and collect metadata on cell phones, computers, and more, without warrant.

These programs, while very intrusive and disturbing, have not been publicly shown to prevent crime because, in cities like Baltimore, Maryland, police have been extremely reluctant to release the results of warrantless surveillance programs.

Our organization is being launched because of the recent public attention to warrantless surveillance. We strongly believe that every person values the natural rights bestowed upon them – one of those being security and privacy, both in person and effects. We believe that with the recent uses of programs like STINGRAY by local police departments, the security and privacy of an individual are threatened.

According to the organizations mission statement, they are seeking to "non-violently end local and state level warrantless digital surveillance in the United States, including that allowed through the USA PATRIOT Act – Section 215, National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year of 2014 – Section 1061, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, and any similar laws, by any non-violent means, including through the use of local legislation, spreading digital tools, encouraging government officials who are working to stop surveillance, and fighting to keep laws expanding upon warrantless surveillance from passing at any level."

Keibler said that he was in the process of getting resolutions put forward in two towns in Pennsylvania and a county in Florida with a population of one million.

Under the US Constitution, the people are to be protected from this kind of invasion of privacy. The Fourth Amendment reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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